


Fight Another Day

by Sholio



Category: Highlander: The Series
Genre: Gen, Physical Disability
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2011-05-22
Updated: 2011-05-22
Packaged: 2017-10-19 17:11:34
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,028
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/203206
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Sholio/pseuds/Sholio
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Duncan has to reinvent himself again after losing a hand in a duel.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Fight Another Day

**Author's Note:**

> This was written for Terajk's [People with Disabilities Being Awesome Commentfic Fest](http://terajk.dreamwidth.org/15589.html) on Dreamwidth. This idea could probably stand to be expanded into a longer story (there are a lot of interesting angles that I didn't get around to exploring) but for now, you get the short version. *g*

It's not the fighting he minds so much as the little things.

Learning to brush his teeth and his hair left-handed. Doing up buttons. Taking a shower, for pete's sake.

He has to learn everything again. The fighting is only part of it, and not even the biggest part, even though that's what his friends keep pushing him into. He knows they're worried; they're afraid a head-hunter is going to come after him before he's ready.

He doesn't know if he'll ever be ready.

For four hundred years, his body has been a finely tuned instrument, a weapon at his command. All that he's learned since he was a young man in Glenfinnan, all the new fighting techniques and skills that he's traveled the world to acquire have been merely refinements to the foundation that was already there. He's always thought himself so adaptable, so quick to pick up new skills, new ideas. Now everything he used to know is in shambles, and he's not sure if he can pick up the pieces. He was a fighting prodigy. Now he's --

"Now you're like the rest of us, MacLeod," Methos says. "Deal with it."

They won't give him sympathy and they won't leave him alone. In bygone days, he used to seek out the best fighting teachers to learn to be even better than they were. Now his teachers are Amanda and Methos, who are far from the best swordfighters he's known, and Joe, who can't duel at all. But what they're good at is the thing he needs to learn: how to win in a fight by something other than sheer swordfighting prowess. Guile, cunning, deceit, the careful and clever uses of technology and strategy -- this is what they're good at, this is what he needs to learn, but even though he's no slouch at strategy in general, this new way of fighting doesn't come easily to him.

They show him the ways of guns and hidden knives and poisons. He hates it, resists it. It feels like cheating.

"It _is_ cheating, that's the point," Amanda says, and throws up her arms in despair.

"It's not cheating," Methos counters. "This is about winning, MacLeod. _Fair_ doesn't enter into it."

"It always has for me," he says, turning away from them.

"Then you'll have to change or die," Methos says to his back.

They don't understand. Sometimes he thinks it's more that they _won't_ understand. But they also drill with him patiently for hour upon hour, as he learns to mirror all the moves that he'd practiced so many times with his dominant hand. It's not that he doesn't know how to fight left-handed at all, but it's not what he's best at, and worse, all his reflexes are predicated upon having a right hand, either carrying a second sword or trading off with the left. The disadvantage of having four hundred years of combat training is that it's also four hundred years of habit he has to unlearn. He's lost count of the number of times that he's flipped his sword from his left hand to the hand that isn't there, sending it skittering across the dojo floor.

"I don't know if I can do it, Joe," he says one night, late, after a few too many drinks, as he's helping Joe close up the bar. "I don't know if I can win a challenge. All the practice in the world, and all the weapons that Methos and Amanda can hide on me, won't make up for the fact that I'm going to be at a serious disadvantage against a skilled opponent."

"Don't fight, then. Do what Methos does, and split."

"That's not always possible, and you know it." Not without giving up more than just a hand. There are things he's not willing to sacrifice.

"Well," Joe says, "I know where I could get a good sniper rifle."

"Don't even joke about it. One on one," Duncan reminds him. "That's how it has to be, how it always has to be. The alternative is war, Joe. Imagine it. Immortals banding together into gangs, hiring mercenaries, stocking up on arsenals of explosives and biological weapons. It wouldn't just be us that'd die -- it would be mortals, too, by the thousands."

And they've both seen, with the Hunters, how changing the rules ripples out in a cascade of other changes, touching and destroying lives. He's afraid of that, too -- afraid that embracing Methos and Amanda's style of fighting will mean another step closer to the same kind of anarchy that marked those dark days.

But life is growth, life is change. It's not always possible to know where the changes will lead. All that they can do, any of them, is take it day by day, step by step.

 _Live, Highlander. Grow stronger. Fight another day._

And when it finally happens, when he finds himself standing with the katana in his left hand and his right tucked into the sleeve of his coat, facing an opponent with a chilling reputation and a two-handed bastard sword gripped in two powerful hands -- he feels the fear wash through him, and drain away, leaving only quiet confidence in its wake.

Because he's not sure if this is what they were trying to teach him, but it's what he learned: that the fight, in the end, is not about skill after all.

It's about confidence.

It's about winning because he _needs_ to win, because he _will_ , no matter what it takes -- but he'll do it on his own terms, too.

He can feel the comforting weight of the gun under his coat, the knife strapped to his leg, but he doesn't think he'll need them. They're just talismans anyway -- and behind them he can feel the presence of Amanda and Methos and Joe, of all those long days in the dojo, all those long nights in Joe's bar.

Duncan swings out the katana with a graceful flick of his wrist. It's easy now, almost effortless. Six months ago, it wasn't.

Grow. Change. Live.

"I am Duncan MacLeod of the clan MacLeod," he says, and the words resonate in him as they always have.


End file.
